Chinese Migrants in Singapore, Chapter Four: Counterpunch

This is the fourth chapter in the story of a Chinese bus drivers’ strike in Singapore, the biggest labor action in the rich Asian city-state in nearly three decades.

The event challenged Singapore’s carefully-crafted image as one of the world’s most orderly and efficient places, and revealed rising tensions over migrant workers, who now are a growing presence across Asia. The strike also underscored the risks faced by Chinese laborers as they fan out across the world in search of jobs that locals won’t fill.

Today: The strike enters a second day, prompting tough action from Singapore authorities.

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Wang Yong, a Chinese bus driver working for Singaporean transport operator SMRT Corp., said he faced a hostile reception when he returned to his dormitory the evening of Monday, Nov. 26, weary after a lengthy shift behind the wheel.

In an interview, the 40-year-old said he wondered: What have I done now?

Wang Yong

Wang Yong seen here in Angola where he works as a machinist with a Chinese construction company.

For him and some other mainland Chinese SMRT drivers living at a dormitory in the Serangoon district of Singapore, a bus strike called by their colleagues living in a Woodlands-district workers’ dormitory that day had seemed far removed.

News of the strike had reached Mr. Wang through Singaporean and Malaysian colleagues at work, he said, but he hadn’t given it much thought.

“Those who went to work today aren’t human! They aren’t fit to be Chinese nationals,” one of his co-workers bellowed, Mr. Wang recalled later in an interview.

Less than six months into the job, Mr. Wang said he wasn’t inclined to risk his livelihood by joining the action.

He said he arrived in June 2012 from Chengdu – capital of China’s southwestern Sichuan province – lured by the prospect of earning more to help provide for his wife and 13-year-old son. Mr. Wang, who also drove buses back home, said he was a long way from recouping the 26,300 yuan (US$4,300) he said he had paid to recruitment agents.

“Unlike those who had worked in Singapore for years, I hadn’t recovered my initial capital. I wasn’t keen on making trouble,” he said.

His co-workers who had stayed away from work that day tried to persuade him to join the cause, which entailed applying for medical leave en masse to skip work.

They reminded him about their grievances over accommodation and pay, he said.

It worked.

“In the end, we didn’t think the consequences would be too severe,” Mr. Wang said. “We felt, since so many people were in the protest together, the company would be forced to start serious dialogue with us.”

The next morning, he and four friends headed straight to a clinic, he said. Mr. Wang said he told the doctor he suffered from sore hips – a real issue but one that he said he had worked through in the past. The doctor prescribed some medication, and signed a chit for a day’s rest, he said.

On Tuesday, Nov. 27, the morning that followed the first day of the strike, SMRT’s shuttle buses left the Woodlands-district dormitory with over a dozen drivers, down from the usual 70 or 80, according to He Junling, a driver from China’s Henan province who had encouraged drivers not to go to work.

Some 112 mainland Chinese drivers from across Singapore, assigned to morning and afternoon shifts, didn’t show for work that day, according to statements later made by prosecutors. Some were holding out from Monday, but others, like Mr. Wang, were striking for the first time.

SMRT officials again scurried to the scene at the Woodlands dormitory, according to drivers and a Wall Street Journal reporter present at the scene.

This time, officials from the transport-workers’ union and the Chinese embassy joined them, hoping to talk the drivers into ending their strike, according to a public statement issued by the embassy. A police posse kept watch outside, as did a gaggle of reporters.

Many of the drivers remained indoors to avoid the media scrum. But a handful emerged, stopping by the adjoining food center for meals.

“We’re not asking to be treated in the same way as Singaporeans. We understand why the locals should be better-paid,” one of the drivers said to the dozen reporters who swarmed his table. “We only want to be treated the same way as the Malaysian drivers are.”

Reuters

A police van departed the dorms in Woodlands district on Nov. 26, 2012.

Reporters asked the driver, a man in his thirties who said he had a wife and an 11-year-old son back home in Jiangsu province, if he feared arrest for not working.

“I didn’t beat up or kill anyone. I didn’t do anything illegal,” he replied. “I’m merely exercising my right to rest.”

This time, however, SMRT didn’t attempt to negotiate a settlement, according to Mr. He, the driver from Henan province who had penned an essay online encouraging the strike.

“They seemed to have made up their minds. They wanted us to be handled by the law,” he said.

SMRT declined to comment on whether its officials held any formal meeting with the drivers who missed work on Tuesday.

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Surveys by local media found few commuters had actually been affected by the walkout. Officials later said SMRT maintained more than 90% of normal services during the strike.

Click to see the key players in the story

But the strike split opinion among Singaporeans.

For some, it was an affront to the rule of law and public order so prized by Singaporean authorities. To others, it highlighted Singapore’s over-reliance on foreign labor and served as a reminder of the public’s lack of concern for migrant workers.

“The government should take these PRC [People’s Republic of China nationals] to task for striking. They have no respect for the local law and think this is China,” a reader wrote in comments on the Straits Times newspaper’s website. “This kind of incident will happen again if no action is taken against them.”

Others were more forgiving. Labor activists argued in media commentaries and online forums that SMRT and the government should shoulder some blame for allowing tensions to fester.

The strike raised questions on “whether [the workers] have a proper channel to seek redress when they feel discriminated at the workplace,” an unemployment counselor wrote in a letter to the Straits Times.

Officials quickly intervened in many of these cases, including the February 2012 incident, and reprimanded employers found to have mistreated workers. But authorities downplayed these episodes as labor disputes, never describing them as strikes.

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On Tuesday evening, Kang Huey Ling, then SMRT’s vice president of bus operations, paid a visit to the Police Cantonment Complex, home to the Singapore police’s Criminal Investigation Department, according to prosecutors’ later statements.

At about 6:48 p.m., she was received by an officer and filed a complaint against the striking drivers, alleging their protest was illegal, prosecutors’ statements said.

Later that evening, Singapore’s Manpower and Transport ministries summoned local news media to a briefing.

“These workers have disrupted public transport services and Singapore’s industrial harmony. The government views these disruptions very seriously,” Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin said at the briefing.

He added that the ministry “understands the bus drivers’ grievances.” Still, he said, “There are right ways and wrong ways to handle these concerns… This illegal strike is not acceptable and would be dealt with in accordance to the law.”

For the first time, Singaporean authorities had described the unfolding episode as a “strike,” a label that SMRT and media had also avoided using until then. Using the term prepared the way for the government to enforce laws against work stoppages it deemed illegal.

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Police moved in the next morning, hauling about 20 mainland Chinese drivers into the Police Cantonment Complex for questioning, according to drivers. Almost all other drivers returned to their jobs, save for six of them later deemed by SMRT to have had valid reasons for missing work.

Investigators quickly identified who they believed to be the leading figures behind the strike: He Junling, the writer of an essay encouraging drivers to miss work; and Liu Xiangying, Gao Yueqiang and Wang Xianjie, the three men accused of helping to hatch the idea for the incident. They were arrested.

What happened next to Messrs. He and Liu remains contested.

According to the two men, police investigators punched them when they – in separate interrogations in different rooms – answered that they didn’t know each other. The two drivers said they only became acquainted after their arrests.

Mr. He said that his interrogator punched him once in the stomach, while Mr. Liu accused an officer of hitting him a few times on the torso. According to Mr. Liu, his interrogator told him: “Do you know I could dig a hole and have you buried in it, and no one would be able to find you?”

Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Manpower said in a joint April 20 statement that Messrs. He and Liu’s statements were “baseless.”

Internal police investigations into the claims didn’t uncover any wrongdoing, according to the Home Affairs ministry.

“We take allegations of police abuse very seriously, especially when they are formally lodged, and investigate them thoroughly,” Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Teo Chee Hean said in the statement. In this case, “the investigations have vindicated the officers in this case and protected their reputations.”

Messrs. He and Liu later declined to pursue the matter, a decision that Singapore authorities said meant the drivers were retracting their allegations.

The two men, in interviews with The Wall Street Journal, maintained their claims and said they had decided not to pursue the matter only because they didn’t want to prolong their stay in Singapore to the detriment of their families, as both men were sole breadwinners.

Mr. He, in a separate statement he issued after returning to China, said he thought it would be difficult to pursue the matter, given the lack of witnesses and video recordings of the interrogation.

In an April 26 statement, the Home Affairs and Manpower Ministries said that Mr. He’s statement was “reckless” and “unfounded.”

“Either he makes a police report and substantiates his allegation with evidence or the allegations must be regarded as unfounded and spurious,” the ministries said.

Tomorrow in Chapter Five: Singapore authorities move swiftly to contain the fallout. But a silver lining emerges for future migrants.

[The Wall Street Journal compiled this account from dozens of interviews, including drivers, defense lawyers and labor activists, as well as archived Internet conversations between drivers, public statements by government and company officials, and court documents. It will run as a serialized story on Southeast Asia Real Time and asia.wsj.com every day this week.]

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